Sunday, March 30, 2014

Turkey blocks YouTube days after Twitter crackdown

The Turkish government banned YouTube on Thursday, less than a week after Ankara made a smiler blackout of the social networking site Twitter. Ankara accuses social media platforms of being used to spread false information. The reasons for the YouTube crackdown are due to a major breach of Turkish national security. The Turkish government said its YouTube block came as a response to the leak of a conversation between top government officials purportedly discussing the possibility of going to war with neighboring Syria. Heard on this tape is the intelligence chief suggesting the possibility of a so called "false flag operation" perhaps firing missiles at a piece of Turkish territory to justify going to war with Syria.

Turkey's government has accused social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, of being used to spread lies since the leaked, high-level conversations from inside the current government have spread online. Unlike previously leaked recording, which all sounded like telephone conversations, the recording released on Wednesday sounds like audio coming from a microphone planted in a room where a meeting is being held. The recording suggest a major security break within the halls of the country's Foreign Ministry.

This week a Turkish court overruled the government's ban of Twitter, but the website is still blocked. According to legal procedures, Turkish authorities have 30 days to implement the court injunction.

The decision to block social media sites due to the current breaches in security are understandable and justified. However, blocking one site will just lead the people responsible for the leaking of confidential information to find alternate ways and different social media sites to post the recordings. The most important thing to do now is to find the people responsible for the leaks and to put an end to it before more information is exposed.